The ZTE Axon 30 5G is already an intriguing smartphone. The second-ever commercial smartphone with an under-display camera, it claims to possess taken the technology to a subsequent level and addressed the issues of its predecessor. A replacement update seemingly pushes the envelope of smartphone technology even further, though in a slightly different direction. The Axon 30 may now be considered the primary smartphone to boast 20GB of RAM, but that seemingly magical upgrade is nearly smoke and mirrors.
A minimum of those hailing from China seems that smartphone manufacturers have finally been trapped in a way that operating systems have long employed for many years. Of course, it’s going to have different names on different platforms. Still, all desktop operating systems had implemented the concept of virtual storage or virtual RAM long before there have been smartphones. Vivo called it Extended RAM, and OPPO has dropped the name “RAM+ Expansion.” Curiously, ZTE‘s update doesn’t provide a flashy title to the feature.
An update to the phone in China has given the Axon 30 8GB more RAM without actually adding any hardware component, of course. As a virtual storage implementation, it simply means 8GB out of the phone’s 256GB has been allocated to act as RAM rather than storage space. This provides more room for apps and app data to work, in case that already generous 12GB RAM wasn’t enough.
That whopping 20GB of RAM doesn’t come without some costs, of course. To lose some space for storing, virtual RAM is also slower than actual DRAM due to various memory technologies. It’d not be that noticeable in actual practice, though, and users might appreciate the very fact that their apps don’t immediately get killed within the background from lack of memory.
Interestingly, the concept of virtual RAM is slowly beginning to creep into Android, and it’d only be a matter of your time before it becomes a mainstream feature. That leaves ample opportunity for manufacturers to shine the feature or, better yet, for Google to form it a typical Android feature.
